Hello my name is David Ronserman and this is Talking Politics, an extra non-Brexit

episode this week with Brett Frischmann, the co-author of a book called Reengineering Humanity

which is about everything as you'll hear in a minute, from Fitbit to the fate of the

human race.

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I spoke to Brett last Wednesday, he was in his office in Philadelphia, I was in mine in Cambridge,

this is the good technology, we're going to hear in a moment about the bad starting with

one of the big ideas in his book what happens when you turn the Turing test on its head.

Brett I thought we could start with the Turing test which is something that listeners

many of them will be familiar with but some might not. The basic idea, devised by the

great computer scientist Alan Turing is it's a way of testing the extent to which machines

are becoming more like us basically and a computer or machine would pass the Turing test

if it could pass as a human in a conversation. But you talk about the other side of the

line as you call it, the human side of the line with the Turing test. So to put it crudely,

there is a question not just about whether they are becoming more like us but whether we

are becoming more like them because another way that machines could more easily pass the

Turing test would be if humans were more machine like. So just tell us a bit about what

you mean by the human side of the line in these tests.

Yeah, I mean I see Alan Turing's test and his discussion of the test is serving a couple

...